March 25, 2005

My favorite sites, two by two

Top 2 most interesting business links:

Buffet’s Collected Letters to ShareholdersWarren Buffet’s letters to the shareholders of Berkshire
Hathaway. More than just a stock picker,
Buffet is the epitome of long-term value investing. The letters are pleasantly readable to boot.link

Google's S-1“Don’t be evil. We believe
strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in
all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we
forgo some short term gains.” This
deserves applause. Of course a booming
online ad industry and an doubling of their IPO price give reason to be
optimistic. Perhaps one dark cloud on
the horizon is the fact that insiders are selling shares like mad (for example,
Larry cashed out an eye-popping $213,360,000 worth of shares in a March 14,
2005 sale) In any case, the “Letters from the Founders”
is a refreshing read.link

Top 2 “discovery great new things” tools

Last FMLast FM takes Amazon’s “people who like X also like Y”
approach to recommending new musicians to a new level. Among other things, Last FM installs a tiny plug in to iTunes and keeps a “weekly chart” of what you are listening to. It also lets you create your own personalized
radio station based on what you have listened to. Your personalized radio station plays stuff it knows you like, and stuff it thinks you might like. If you love to discover good new music, this is your
site. My page herelinkDel.icio.us Don't let the slightly lascivious name fool you, this is just an innocent public bookmarks site. What makes it great is that it lets you keep your bookmarks on their website, and view the bookmarks of others. It also offers a perfect lesson in the power of tagging. The "popular" link, which keeps tabs of which sites are bookmarked the most that day, never fails to unearth fascinating new things.My bookmarks herelink

Top 2 Physics links

MP3s of Feynman’s LecturesYou mean to tell me that all the people walking around with iPods aren't listening to physics lectures? Well they
should be. Widely considered the 2nd
best physicist of the 20th century, and far and away its best
teacher, these lectures are fascinating and accessible to non-science types.link

PhysicsSongs.orgYes, songs about physics. One part goofy, one part great, Professor Walter Smith has collected
dozens of songs about physics from musically inclined physicists. He also has recorded several of his own (full
disclosure: Walter is a mentor and former
professor of mine. While I learned a lot from him, somehow I never was able to approach the genius of:“These seven crystal systems form the fourteen Bravais
lattices.They’ve hardly anything to do with artichokes or radishes –They’re great for metals, minerals, conductors of the
semi-kind –The Bravais lattices describe all objects that are crystalline!”)link

Top 2 brilliant applications for the internet

Skype“Internet telephony that just works.”

Skype combined with a $14 headset
is so wonderful that you will end up pestering all your friends to sign
up. Skype combines instant messaging, peer-2-peer file transfer
capability and telephony all in one slick application. My cell
phone usage is down 40% in the past few months. Great for group work.
My only gripe is that you can't play music when someone is on hold!linkFlickrBought by Yahoo last week, Flickr has emerged as the best place
to share and organize photos on the net. If Yahoo doesn’t infect it with its “we barely meet our customers
expectations, nothing more” attitude, Flickr should continue to roll out new,
innovative features that leave the commercial sites looking overexposed. (get it?)My hazy cameraphone pictures are hereMind-blowing mosaics herelink